Theme For June Photo Contest

[JDB]

Thanks for all of you that voted for my picture in the April contest. I'm honored to be hosting the June Contest. Also I look forward To being a Long Standing member of the Photography group.

This is a first for me and I am excited to see what you all come up with for the theme I have chosen.

I want to give a Very Special thanks to my wonderful neighbor, friend and Great travel partner Mira for helping me with the running of the June contest. I couldn't do it without you!!



The theme for the June Contest will be "Water Runs Through It"

This theme can mean a variety of things it is not one specific thing. Its what speaks to you when you think of it.


Processing of photos will be allowed in this contest and will be at the discretion of each individual photographer



The Submissions will start on June 11th and will will run for 7 days or 30 entries whichever comes first



If you need Help to post photos to DU please click the link below or you may message me and I will try to assist you if I can
http://www.democraticunderground.com/103623797

Please keep your entry no larger than 800 pixels in its longest dimension and under 300K in file size. If you need help posting a photograph or with image sizing, just ask.



The winner of the contest agrees to host the next month's contest (or recruit someone else to host the contest), and pick the next month's theme. The host of the monthly contest cannot enter the contest they are hosting.

***In order to be able to host the contest if you are a winner you will need to become a star member in DU.***


CONTEST LICENSE:

An entrant to this contest, by submitting a photograph, is giving permission for that photograph to be copied to Demopedia or to a linked Gallery and included in a DU Calendar that will display the photographs entered for this contest for the purpose of publicizing future contests and/or commemorating current and past contests. The entrant retains all other rights to the photograph being submitted. Neither Demopedia and/or a linked Gallery may use any photograph submitted for any purpose other than to display the photograph being submitted by the entrant, and neither gains any real or implied ownership rights to the photograph.

[Mira]

1. I'm smiling wide!

Great start - and now I have to put on my thinking cap.

[mnhtnbb]

2. Great theme! All the Texans should be in good shape; Californians may have to

check their archives!

[NV Whino]

3. Ha!

[GeorgeGist]

4. kick and rec

[Agschmid]

5. Very cool, kicked.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

6. This is a great theme!

I won't have any time to take any new ones, but my archives are full of 'em!

Thank you, my dear JDB!

[juxtaposed]

7. So we've gone full photoshop in this forum now, full hdr is what it takes to win a photo contest

and come in second...
Count me out, this like fox news of photography bright and shinny, but not real.
Lets keep it real

[JDB]

8. Im sorry that you feel that way

well we all have different opinions and i will respect your opinion but I do not agree with it.

[ManiacJoe]

9. Since you are hosting this month's contest,

the amount of allowed processing is entirely up to you.

Please update the announcement with an official statement of what you decide for this month's contest.

[ohheckyeah]

10. Most, if

not all, professional photographers manipulate their photos. Few of them are "real" unless photojournalism.

[mnhtnbb]

12. Contests are pretty laissez-faire...so lots of opportunities

to enter almost anything.

We had one a while back that was supposed to be Still Life, and quite a few
entries, including the winning one, would have been disqualified from a juried
contest for not meeting the criteria!

So, take them for what they are: a chance to share work and see how people respond
to different photos.

[countryjake]

15. Your accusation is totally misplaced and not true, at all!

See here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026369620

I won that contest just a few months ago, with a cheap-ass FujiFilm camera, and barely could even figure out how to upload it so I could submit it; I don't know what "hdr" means and have no photo shopping abilities, whatsoever.

For real.

It takes some chutzpah to level such a criticism at a group which has always been a place for those of who simply love to take pictures to come and learn about photography from others who actually know what they're doing and are obviously outstanding photographers.

[Blue_In_AK]

69. I'm not a fan of HDR, either,

and never use it, although I will post-process a bit if contrast needs adjusting or whatever. That being said, I have won contests, so I don't think HDR is going to win every time. These contests are just for fun anyway, so, really, who cares what the people in GD think or who they vote for. Post what appeals to you, and if people like it, fine, and if they don't, that's their loss.

[CC]

11. Congrats on your win JDB

and welcome to the photogroup. Love having new talent! Looking forward to lots of photos from you.

[JDB]

13. Thank You. it means alot

I Did not mean to start a battle with anyone and I hope that is does not tarnish my standing in the Group.. Thanks for your support

[CC]

16. That was not your doing

and it should not tarnish you at all. Seems we have one of these ever few years. Maybe something thinks we need stirred up when we get too complacent. Hopefully everyone will let things settle back to our normal calm, cool and collected safe haven again.

[rdking647]

14. given the rain weve had all month i should be able to find something :)

[mnhtnbb]

17. Anybody having a hard time choosing a shot for this one?

So many options!

[Mira]

18. I got mine.

I went on a special shoot for it and came home with it.
I hope you will like it, there are no reflections involved.

I dropped my external hard drive with thousands of photos on it. It is broken and dead. A 24 inch simple drop - I am crestfallen.
Three different recovery companies have quoted more than a thousand dollars to get the photos back and I cannot pay that.
The heart breaker is that there are many family photos I now miss sorely.

The not so bad thing is that I must go out and shoot, and don't have so many files to fall back on.

[mnhtnbb]

19. Oh, Mira!

How awful about the external hard drive. Have you tried posting a Can you help me message in the
Computer Help and Support Group of DU http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1095
to see if some one of the talented computer people could do something for you? Or maybe find
you someone willing to do the recovery for less?

I know what it means to lose photos because of our fire. We were extremely fortunate to have several
photo albums--from when the kids were little--survive. The insurance agent who came to take
our inventory discovered them in the remains and showed us--and some neighbors who helped, how to remove the photos and
dry them out. Eventually I found someone to scan all of them and then make new prints. But all the photos I still hadn't put in albums,
wedding album, honeymoon album, several albums devoted to other special trips...all gone. The fire was
just about the time I was starting to toy with digital, so that first camera went, too.

[Mira]

22. I'm playing Ostrich mostly

one of the 1000 dollar plus people explained the high cost to me this way:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but, there just isn’t any inexpensive way to recover the data in cases like this. If the drive fell off of the table and it is clicking, there is a very high probability that the read/write heads are damaged. (there is a chance that the problem is something else, unlikely but if so, the cost would be substantially lower).

If the read/write heads are damaged, then unfortunately, you would be looking at a recovery cost of between $900 - $1600. The reason for the high cost is; the read/write heads will need to be removed in our clean-room and a new head stack installed and calibrated. It is not a particularly difficult task just very exact and tedious, but in many cases, we will go through multiple head stacks due to the damage created when the drive fell. If you decide that you want us to attempt a recovery, we will be glad to examine the drive and give you an exact cost.

I gave up on it then to rest my weary head and just go out and shoot new ones

[mnhtnbb]

23. Having been through the pain of losing photos--from the fire--

I can tell you there are people out there to capitalize on your emotional loss.
If this is someone you know and trust who gave you that info, then it's probably
not worth following up at this point. But if it's not, I would at least attempt to
get some info from the DU computer group.

It took me two years to get around to finding someone to scan and touch up
my photos that survived the fire. When I finally did it, I did it for a fraction of the cost that companies
were quoting me for the process.

[Mira]

24. Thank you so much

you helped lift my head out of the sand.
And I meant to say how very sad I am for your loss of your photos.
I have a huge box of prints that I treasure, and I know exactly where it is in case of fire!

[dixiegrrrrl]

21. Oh no.........

God, I feel your pain.

I hope you can find a workable redundancy to save back up photos. I know cloud storage was supposed to be helpful in that regard, then started reading of problems with some cloud services.
Mr. dixie found me a ginormous thumb drive to back up all my ebooks and my music, plus I have them on an external hard drive, which I unplug every time I hear a thunderstorm approaching.

[countryjake]

25. Losing your family pictures, the history, is more than heartbreaking.

Surely there must be someone, somehow, who can help fix that thing to get your photos back! It seems in this magical age of electronics, there are plenty of experts who are capable of just about anything and so many have found themselves unemployed, surely you could find one who might do what's needed without charging you an arm and a leg. Maybe, if there's a college nearby, you could take that hard-drive to their computer dept and see if the instructor would be able to use your damaged gizmo as a teaching moment for the students, something like that?

When I first moved to Washington state with my baby (thirty five yr ago, now), I left behind boxes and boxes full of my lifetime of snapping pictures, including all of the recent ones I'd taken of my almost three year old daughter. Tucked away in the corner of an upstairs bedroom of an ancient Ohio farmhouse that I'd rented with my brother, those boxes fell victim to the chewing spitting hungry jaws of a horde of termites. Practically every single photo was destroyed and the ones that they did not eat were spattered or encased in their cement-like excretions which were impossible to remove.

The only photos that I have now from my girl's first three years of life are two framed 8x10s which still sit up on the piano in the house I grew up in (back in Ohio). Pics that I didn't shoot.

So, I do know how upset you must be feeling, but please hold out hope...your pictures are still in that stupid thing.
You only need to find a reasonable way to recover them.

Here's a thought. As a last resort, you could always make yourself seem a potential threat to our government.

The FBI would have those photos in hand in a New York minute.

[Mira]

26. You are making me think first

and laugh out loud next.

My brain bleeds a little to hear your story and learning of the loss. Just for that I think I will move the photo albums to a more front place of my house.

I've been distraught about this, but I have CDs of photos as well, and when it "floats" as I call something getting my full attention I will check and see what I still have and what I don't.

Thanks for caring!

[alfredo]

27. That really sucks, but now you have a new, unencumbered beginning.

[Mira]

30. Dear Alfredo,

your remark reminds me of a story:

I had an employee who had created a sign with pool rules, at a time in the eighties when we did not yet use computers, and the letters were rubbed off onto transparencies. She worked 2 days on lines and lines of copy. I did not proof it, she made 10 bucks an hour and was usually reliable.
I set up a screen, and poured in the ink, and screened the first one onto aluminum.
All the lines were crooked.

I held it up in utter dismay to show her and she looked at it quizzically and then said with her deep drawl
"But isn't it a pretty color?"

[alfredo]

33. I like her response.

[Solly Mack]

20. Weird things speak to me.

[alfredo]

28. Me too, my in-laws

[Solly Mack]

29. Oh, now.

[alfredo]

31. They'd admit it. I fit in.

[Solly Mack]

32. You'd know best.

[alfredo]

34. Water seeks its own level.

[Solly Mack]

35. Oh, the places you'll go.

[alfredo]

36. right down the drain.

[Solly Mack]

37. Where you'll travel to parts unknown

or not.

[alfredo]

38. Well, I just finished a peanut butter latte, so it won't matter.

[Solly Mack]

39. Who needs to travel when they can have a peanut butter latte at home.

[alfredo]

40. So true. I'm going to add coca next. I will fly

[Solly Mack]

41. Make it dark cocoa...

and I'll live vicariously through you.

[alfredo]

42. I did and it sent me up, then an hour later I crashed out on the couch. Exciting life I live.

[Solly Mack]

43. Yeah. I take naps, too.

[alfredo]

44. I'm sitting here, camera in hand waiting for Barcelona to put away Juventus.

[Solly Mack]

45. and then what?

[alfredo]

46. hell if I know

[Solly Mack]

47. You could cheer. You could have another latte.

You could take a walk.

You could discuss your views on the artificial representation of cheese (Cheetos) v. real cheese. (any real cheese)

Or not.

[alfredo]

51. I went out, took some photos downtown, came home, drank half a beer and watched the Belmont.

Now I am going to have a cucumber avocado sandwich. Barcelona wins, I took some photos, and my horse won in the Belmont. You got to be for a horse that had its tail chewed off by another horse. He doesn't want the rest chewed off, so he runs away from the others.

[Solly Mack]

52. We're having a full day.

I had a horse nibble on my braid once. Same horse walked me into the lake.

[alfredo]

53. My sister in law has worked with horses for most of her life. She just finished lengthy rehab

after being dragged by a horse. This was her first serious injury from a horse.

[Solly Mack]

54. Yikes! Will she be OK?

[alfredo]

55. She's back at work. She's tough.

Her hand got tangled in the reins when the colt bolted. Freak accident.

[Solly Mack]

56. She sounds tough. I'm glad she's back at work.

I still ride horses - just never near water.

[alfredo]

57. some horses don't like water.

[Solly Mack]

58. and that horse didn't like Solly.

[alfredo]

59. My late brother in law raised Jennys. He had some Jacks, but they are not that nice.

[Solly Mack]

60. My childhood donkey went to live in the zoo.

[alfredo]

61. My rabbit went to live "on a farm."

[Solly Mack]

62. I'm sorry. I could actually visit my old donkey.

[alfredo]

63. It was a lovely lie, and I bought it, sort of.

[Solly Mack]

64. I'd rather you pulled my leg and not my heartstrings.

[alfredo]

65. Dad was good at pulling the leg, but too "German" to pull the heartstrings.

[Solly Mack]

66. I take after my Mother too.

[Mira]

67. Solly and Alfredo

are you two related?
I am hysterically wide eyed at the one liner exchange you had here, and it tickles me.
So much said and implied with so little words.

I will learn from that.
You two rock.

[Solly Mack]

68. Depends on how far back you go.

[countryjake]

48. We're going on a campout this afternoon...

After I've literally run my butt off the entire morning, getting the fixings together, packing the car, and making sure we're taking everything we'll need...I finally am done, come in and sit down to see what ultra-violent movie my SO was watching that whole time...he's not even awake...snoring on the couch.

I'm taking a nap, right now! It's so hot here right now, I dread Summer.

[Solly Mack]

49. Sweet dreams!

Safe trip!

[countryjake]

50. No such luck...

He's awake and raring to go now.

We will enjoy ourselves, tho. We're not even going five miles away...I live in camping heaven!